I am curious what kind of material prospective readers find interesting on an author's blog. My favorite authors range from not posting anything for months or years at a time, to talking about their health issues, struggles with getting themselves to write, or about the books of other authors they are reading. None of these seem appropriate for a new author trying to interest new readers, so I am curious what else you have seen that would be interesting, particularly for the blog of a new author without an existing following. For example, in my case, I've been toying with the idea of writing up some of the research I've done for my book, or of talking about hobbies, trips abroad etc.
I first began to think about writing while reading science fiction as a teenager back in the 1980s. In the subsequent decades, whenever I dabbled with writing science fiction, I focussed my efforts on coming up with novel ideas, fanciful creatures and exotic alien landscapes. However the results were always dry and boring, even to me. The big breakthrough came when I realized that these otherworldly environments were irrelevant. What mattered were the human stories within them, driven by colorful characters and their interactions. It's obvious now, and much more fun, but it took me a long time to see this.
A second revelation came after I sent my first scifi novel to an assessment editor. He shocked me by telling me I shouldn't have sprinkled almost every sentence with adverbs. After railing against this for a while, I did some research online and discovered how right he was. I then began to notice that the most compelling public talks and the most immersive stories were the ones with the fewest adverbs. With that evidence in hand, I spent over a year re-writing my novel from start to finish, using almost no -ly adverbs, except between speech marks, where they give emotional color to my characters' speech. The result was very much worth the effort.
Right now, as I near the end of my second novel, my latest revelations have been reading about the problems with filter words, and about using free indirect speech to decrease the emotional distance between readers and characters. I am now wondering whether or not to switch to free indirect speech in the final book of my trilogy. In particular, I worry whether such a change in style would change people's perceptions of the characters they've become familiar with.